May 06, 2004

So That's What The Kids Call It Now...

It used to be that liberals could just short-circuit themselves with outrage overload and be done with it. You know, the shouting at the television, the sputtering disbelief. We thought The Onion had beat us to the last satirical remark ever on the end of peace and prosperity as we knew it, and pretty much sank into despair.

But then we got all perky, uppity, and generally irrepressible when it started looking like we might have a chance to throw the bums out. Oh, we started treading lightly into the halls of satire, venturing warily outside the vestibule of snark, and in no time we're riding tea trays down the stairs that lead to the ROFL galleries.

Now, we face a new challenge. The current satire crisis threatens to overload the capability of liberal humorists to come up with crazy ass satire faster than conservative politicians can implode in even crazier scandals. We're already seeing quadruple the number of repetitive stress injuries among the self-appointed punditry, and a growing paranoid suspicion that We Could Not Have Really Just Heard That.

Several cases of spontaneous catatonia are rumored, often beginning with the victim exclaiming, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Did somebody drug our drinking water, or did the news anchor just say ..." The victims have all recovered to date following intensive bed rest, therapy, and an afternoon in the park.

The satire crisis is real, growing, and is projected to continue until at least January, 2005. If you feel an overload event coming on, health experts recommend a 1-3 day news blackout along with a nice bottle of wine and a bubble bath.

I'm definitely at that point, and I know a lot of the people at my university are similar. It used to be that we would save up something along precisely the lines of "We Could Not Have Really Just Heard That" and then each week we could get together and laugh our heads off.

But now ... now ... there's just too much! Insanely, incredibly, obviously, STUPID comments are being made to the point where I was honestly thinking about having to write them down in order to keep track. I mean, I know we feel that its so easy to take the piss out of the current crop, but sometimes I feel we can actually now just sit back and let them do it themselves, because there is nothing that we could say that could come close even if we were making this stuff up.